The press is yet again filled with stories about how the oil market is in chaos. “20 minutes that broke the oil market” blares Bloomberg about the March 20 WTI meltdown, even though it was really 20 minutes that broke one particular futures market for one particular grade of oil for delivery in one particular place. In any case, here is Bloomberg’s own chart of oil prices as of this morning:

Honestly, I don’t see anything that anyone should consider unexpected. Oil prices were primed to go down by squabbling between Russia and Saudi Arabia, and then, starting in March, reduced demand from COVID-19 sent them on a steady downward course. Since mid-March WTI has been dropping at a steady pace aside from a single day, while Brent’s downturn has been noisier but more moderate.

Obviously these are not good days for anyone who’s long oil, but there’s a big glut and reduced demand thanks to the coronavirus lockdowns. It’s hardly a big shock that oil prices are continuing to drop. Wake me up when crude goes down to a buck a barrel.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through April 27. Things look fairly good today. Just about everyone is either declining or at least starting to show signs of decline. The US is finally starting to drop slowly, and even Canada looks like just maybe they’ve peaked. The only exception, oddly, is Germany, but that might only be because their numbers are so noisy. There’s a plausible interpretation of their scatterplot that suggests they peaked about a week ago and have been declining ever since. Sweden is still a bit of question mark, but they look like they’re at least plateauing, and maybe even dropping.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The COVID Tracking Project is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.

This is what our TVs are going to look like for at least the rest of the year.Kevin Drum

IANAE and my beliefs about COVID-19 are just the instincts of an intelligent amateur who’s read a lot and tried to make sense of things, even when they don’t all seem to quite add up. Feel free to ignore me. That said, here’s what I tentatively believe:

1. COVID-19, left to its own devices,¹ is probably somewhat less deadly than we originally thought—though I can’t really put a firm number on “somewhat less.” Maybe a population death rate of 0.1-0.3 percent for the current wave?
2. Up through the end of January, it was all but unanimous that COVID-19 was not a big threat to the United States. We should all stop rewriting history to pretend otherwise.
3. In the US, California usually gets credit for being the fastest-acting state and it didn’t start lockdowns until March 19. Even in Europe, most countries didn’t start lockdowns much more than a week before that. The World Health Organization didn’t designate COVID-19 as a pandemic until March 11. I have trouble blaming anyone for “ignoring the problem” because they didn’t take extreme actions before then. We were virtually all guilty of that.
4. The NBA deserves more credit than it gets for lighting a fire under everyone’s butts by immediately canceling their season after Rudy Gobert tested positive for the coronavirus. This was a very dramatic statement.
5. The full suite of virus countermeasures has probably reduced the COVID-19 death toll by about half.
6. However, we still have very little idea of which countermeasures provide the biggest bang for the buck. School closings? Stay-at-home orders? Mask wearing? Restaurant shutdowns? It’s critically important that we try to get a handle on this. If, for example, it turns out that schools can be re-opened with only small effects as long as we keep doing everything else, that would relieve a mountain of pressure from a lot of people.
7. Don’t trust any studies based on data from Wuhan. I can’t speculate on the reasons for this, but Wuhan simply seems to be fairly unique among COVID-19 outbreaks.
8. The US will probably enter summer with 100,000 officially recorded coronavirus deaths. The real number will be about 200,000.
9. I am not entirely opposed to a slow, controlled relaxation of countermeasures in states that want to try it. It might still be a little too early for this. However, it might also be the only way we ever find out what works and what doesn’t. I sure hope an army of epidemiologists and statisticians and freakonomists are looking for clever ways to measure the effects of different actions in different states.
10. I don’t especially blame Donald Trump for not endorsing lockdowns and quarantines and so forth until mid-March. In this, he was probably following expert advice fairly reasonably. What I do blame him for is: not planning for the worst case when he had the chance during February; consistently providing the country with bad information about vaccines and cures and bleach and so forth; declining to take testing seriously; turning the entire operation into a partisan crusade; using the month of April to fire up his base to “liberate” red states; wasting time blaming China and WHO and Democrats and governors for his own mistakes; putting Jared Kushner in charge of an important task that needed someone experienced and competent; and just generally acting like a buffoon the entire time. Please note that this is not an exhaustive list.
11. I hope I’m wrong, but I certainly don’t expect a vaccine to be available this year, and probably not next year either. It’s possible we could have one in late 2021 if we’re very lucky and everything goes exactly right. That would be great, but my experience tells me this rarely happens.
12. Nor am I super optimistic about developing an effective antigen test in the next few months—and I’m disturbed that we (apparently) haven’t been spending time on a crash program to build much greater PCR test capability because we’re hoping for an antigen “breakthrough.” If there’s a concrete reason that a big increase in PCR testing is impossible, someone should explain why. If not, it should continue to be our backup plan in case nothing else pans out.

That’s it for now. Any or all of these are subject to change as new evidence arrives.

¹“Left to its own devices” deserves a brief explanation. There’s a minimum response that any serious epidemic will prompt: hand washing, basic hygeine, keeping a distance from others when possible, quarantine of those showing symptoms, etc. I assume that everyone would have done all those things regardless. By “left to its own devices” I mean that the virus is allowed to spread without major interventions like school and business closings, stay-at-home orders, massive testing, and so forth.

Earlier today I was griping about Deborah Birx’s unwillingness to provide a straightforward description of what our COVID-19 testing plan is. However, although I still can’t translate her gobbledegook, it occurs to me that I can at least perform a public service by describing the three basic categories of testing. So here it is.

Here’s the latest from a USA Today/Suffolk Poll:

Trump also has lost support by double-digits among men, a group that has been part of his political base. While men still back Trump over Biden 46%-35%, that’s a narrower advantage than in December, when it was 56%-30%. Women now support Biden 53%-30%.

That’s a 23-point deficit for Trump among women, compared to a 13 percent deficit in the 2016 election. Women really, really don’t like Trump these days.

On the other hand, this mostly represents more women becoming undecided. Hillary Clinton got 54 percent of the women’s vote in 2016 and Biden hasn’t yet bested that.

Friday was dex night and April is the start of Milky Way season, so I headed out to Anza-Borrego State Park to take some pictures. I’ve already learned the hard limits of my camera for this kind of photography, and there’s nothing I can do about this: it has a small sensor and produces noisy long-exposure images at the high ISOs you need for night sky photography. However, its lens also maxes out at 24mm, which is nowhere near enough to capture the entire Milky Way, and there is something I can do about that. I’ve been playing around with panoramic shots using Photoshop’s merge function and I was curious to see if it would work on the night sky. What if I took a whole series of photos and stitched them together?

Photoshop seems to have trouble with images that have lots of fiddly bits, so I wasn’t hopeful. To my surprise, though, it had no trouble at all. The picture below is four wide by three high (though I probably cropped out most of the upper row of images) and Photoshop put all twelve together with no fuss at all.

I took this on San Felipe Road looking southeast. The city light at the bottom is from Ocotillo, about 40 miles away. The planet above the light dome is Jupiter, with Saturn below and to its left. The key thing in night sky photos taken in the desert is the wind, which can whip up dust that obscures the colors. But the air was still on Friday, so the colors came through fairly nicely. In the end, this was quite successful, but it’s still taken with a camera that’s barely up to the task, which means I had to underexpose the image and then heavily Photoshop it. There’s no way around this, unfortunately.

Still, not bad, and I have one more that turned out fairly well. I’ll put it up later this year.

Here’s another estimate of the evolution of R₀. It’s from Simas Kucinskas, a finance professor in Berlin:

As always, I’ll warn that this is guesswork at best since it’s based on unreliable data. Still, it’s the only data we have, and perhaps a rough idea is better than nothing.

You can make a chart from your own collection of countries here. To the extent that this stuff is believable, I find Sweden the most interesting curve. They allegedly pushed their real-time value of R from 4 to 2 in the space of a single week. Impressive! On the downside, they haven’t pushed it very much farther down since then.

My expectation is that you’d normally see the value of R start high, and then there would be an inflection point when lockdowns and social distancing started taking effect. In these curves, you see that for Sweden and the US. But for the other three countries you don’t: there’s just a smooth downward slope. Why is that?

I can’t pretend to know how good these estimates are. But we’re all bored and everyone loves a dashboard that allows you to play around with different countries. So have fun, but don’t take any of it too seriously.

Should we reopen Las Vegas? Just in case you’re wondering, here’s what it looks like in the absence of lockdowns and social distancing rules:

This was taken during my visit in January. Good luck, punters!

Mateusz Slodkowski/ZUMA

I complained yesterday about how opaque Deborah Birx was in her discussion of coronavirus testing, and I got some pushback that maybe I didn’t understand all the different kinds of tests she was talking about. Maybe! But here’s the transcript of what Birx said after Chuck Todd played a tape of Bill Gates criticizing our lack of testing capacity. Can you figure it out? My comments are in italics.

BIRX: Uniquely, we are using nucleic acid testing. What does that mean? You are actually sampling for the live virus in people’s noses or in people’s throats. And then you have to expand that doing what we call nucleic acid testing.

Wait. We’re using nucleic acid testing but then we have to expand that by doing what we call nucleic acid testing? My best guess is that she meant to say we’re using PCR testing now and want to expand that to NAT later. Maybe?

So this is not like a flu test or a strep test. So when we talked to the commercial companies almost seven weeks ago, eight weeks ago, we asked every single corporation and every single diagnostic company that had nucleic acid testing capacity on their platforms, which is primarily HIV and HPV, and make tests for those platforms. And in less than two to three weeks, every single one of these platforms are up and running. Etc.

So . . . all these companies are now making NAT testing available for COVID-19?

TODD: Look, the debate about testing, and I know the president gets defensive and claims that testing has been a success story. It does feel as if there is a hesitance to use the Defense Production Act in order, whether it is swabs, whether it is getting these reagents, whether it is forcing these labs to process things faster, guaranteeing some funding for it. Why the hesitance inside that task force?

BIRX: I think all of those pieces are discussed with — inside the task force. From generation of swabs, to generation of tubes and the media. I think what people do not see behind the scenes is how FDA have worked with corporations to really change the number of swabs that can be utilized. If you remember, we — just four weeks ago, we were recommending these nasopharyngeal swabs and we have moved to multiple different swabs, multiple different extraction media. The intent is to continue to scale, with the support of states and working with states, to continue to scale testing. But at the same time, we have to realize that we have to have a breakthrough innovation in testing. We have to be able to detect antigens, rather than constantly trying to detect the actual live virus or the viral particles itself. And to really move into antigen testing. And I know corporations and diagnostics are working on that now. We have to have a breakthrough. This RNA testing will carry us certainly through the spring and summer. But we need to have a huge technology breakthrough. And we are working on that at the same time.

RNA testing? Is this the current generation of PCR testing that she’s talking about? Or is she referring to NAT testing? Or what? And why does she seem to suggest that antigen testing is a replacement for PCR testing? I mean, it could be, but its main purpose is to identify anyone who’s ever had the virus. PCR testing is designed to find out if someone has the virus right now. Birx also says that we’re going to keep scaling up the current testing, but we really need a breakthrough innovation.

TODD: So essentially what you’re saying is we don’t have — you don’t think we have the capacity to ramp up the testing you would like because we need this — we basically need a breakthrough for easier testing?

BIRX: No, I think we have other technology that we think can come online within the next two to three weeks. That will be a breakthrough in the RNA type testing. But I think also just for ease of use, finding out how we can do antigen type testing like they do with flu. It can be used as a screening test. And then you could do the actual RNA testing for a confirmatory test. Just allows you to screen large numbers of individuals quickly.

Now she’s talking about a breakthrough in “RNA testing.” In the next two or three weeks. That sounds interesting! But she never tells us what she’s talking about. And we don’t need a huge breakthrough in antigen testing after all. It would just be nice.

I get that sometimes on live TV you’re not always as clear as you’d like to be. But come on. This stuff isn’t that complicated. Are we ramping up the current generation of PCR testing? Or do we think that’s impossible and we’re waiting for antigen testing to become available? If that’s the case, why is it impossible to ramp up PCR testing? Or is it possible but not in the timeframe we need it? And what are we going to use the $25 billion in test funding for?

Is there someone who can provide us with a simple, one-page fact sheet spelling out our current testing plans? If not, why not? This stuff shouldn’t be done behind closed doors.

The original Obamacare legislation created something called “risk corridors,” which guaranteed insurers certain payments if they lost money on the exchanges. Republicans have been trying ever since to cut off the payments, arguing that they were never appropriated. The insurers, conversely, argue that they joined the exchanges in good faith, assuming that the word of the federal government was sufficient to guarantee them payment if they suffered unexpected losses.

Today the Supreme Court ruled that Obamacare should be allowed to work as intended. That’s good news. The better news is that the ruling was 8-1, with only Samuel Alito dissenting. Perhaps I’m being overly optimistic here, but this might signal that the Court is getting tired of endless challenges to Obamacare. If that’s the case, it means they’re likely to toss out the ridiculous challenge being brought by Republican governors later this year. They claim that the individual mandate penalty can no longer be considered a tax because Congress zeroed it out in 2017 and you can’t have a zero tax. The governors go on to argue that if it’s not a tax, then the mandate is unconstitutional; and if the mandate is unconstitutional then the entire act is unconstitutional.

Aside from everything else, the patent absurdity of Congress being able to yo-yo between constitutional and unconstitutional simply by passing changes to a tax rate should give everyone pause. And perhaps it will.